ABSTRACT
This chapter is about the kinds of knowledge made by and through practices of mapping and naming, and how to think critically about the power of these practices through a critical ancient world studies (hereafter CAWS) lens. At stake is how to represent relationships between time and space that do not reinscribe ways of looking at the world that situate Europe at the spatial or temporal centre of the world. Drawing on critiques emergent from critical cartography, this chapter analyses the representational logic and rhetorical moves of a particularly significant map for the formation of classical knowledge, namely, The Barrington World Atlas. It inquires into the decision to prioritise the classical topographical and toponymic features of the classical world above temporally later ones. Rather than understanding this as a neutral exercise of representing with accuracy, this chapter argues that such decisions reveal the coloniality of privileging the ancient and a potent iteration of what Donna Haraway deems a “god trick”.
